When building loosely coupled cloud apps, microservices are today’s preferred pattern. James Lewis and Martin Fowler wrote the seminal introduction, and the concept has been disseminated widely since. While Lewis and Fowler’s entire post is a fantastic read, one specific requirement stands out: microservices must favor “smart endpoints and dumb pipes.”Essentially, the smarts should be in the app components, and the communication between those components must be as simple as possible. Without that requirement, architectures will bloat and become monolithic. When asked, “How does your PaaS support microservices?” most enterprise PaaS vendors offer little more than deployment agility. While agility is an important piece of the puzzle, application bootstrap policies directly support both the smart-endpoints / dumb-pipes vision and the implementation of microservices.With smart pipes, the danger of increased complexity is high. Smart pipes often lead to a monolithic architecture. Lewis and Fowler, in a sidebar to their write-up, state that they have seen “many botched implementations of service orientation” including the tendency to hide complexity away in enterprise service buses (ESBs).Why Is That Bad? Smart pipes create an unintended tight coupling between endpoints and the pipes themselves. That is, an application becomes dependent on expectations in the communications protocols for proper function, and the general systems behavior is now defined in the pipes. A system leveraging a smart ESB ends up more often than not functionally dependent on that ESB (carrying around an ESB is quite the dependency!). As soon as pipes start to become too smart, they force monolithic creep. What’s worse is that endpoints may become co-dependent through the smart pipe with each expecting an implicit finessing of RPC and payloads to work properly.Unfortunately, the temptation to make pipes smarter is high. In the names of abstraction, architecture standardization, and re-usability, adding logic to communication pathways between services is commonplace. What starts as a microservices architecture quickly bloats to a monolithic architecture. However, a system does need a common, orthogonal offering to keep redundant functionality low.Does it make sense to embed authentication logic into every endpoint or to script monitoring hooks into a web service or to write code for any other non-business function in a microservice? It does, if it’s the only way to keep “endpoints smart and pipes dumb.”Fortunately, It's Not the Only OptionPrevious generations of developers introduced techniques like aspect-oriented programming to deal with the issue of separating cross-cutting concerns from application logic for better code modularity. Interestingly, similar techniques can be leveraged in cloud-computing and PaaS-based microservices. Jon Norton, a software engineer, explains an interesting feature called “application bootstrap policies” that allows IT operators to instrument libraries and modify any guest application.Interested in mixing APM into an app deployment? Write a bootstrap policy. Want to modify the IL or Java bytecode of any guest app to introduce some fancy byte-level instrumentation? Write a bootstrap policy.Bootstrap policies are a modular vehicle for mixing cross-cutting concerns into endpoints on a PaaS. The power in this is huge and should not be underestimated. Endpoints can be smart while pipes remain dumb. Most importantly, bootstrap policies support a core commitment that all developers avoid writing unnecessary code.Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of Apprenda.See More

Let’s face it. IT has traditionally been looked down upon and minimized as a “cost center.” If you bought software or technology in the enterprise, you looked to the IT team to support it. IT was rarely strategic, despite many positioning it that way.In the early days, businesses bought anything and everything, and had IT run it, resulting in a department that grew haphazardly with many inconsistencies. Most IT departments then took on the challenge of rationalizing and reconciling their IT assets, and overcompensated by attempting to limit what the lines of business were allowed to do. In many companies, this created an adversarial relationship between IT and the business. The result is that the business views IT as a roadblock, and will try to go around IT by using public cloud solutions. But what should IT do? Block the public cloud? Probably not. The public cloud is happening, with or without IT approval.A better approach is to convert the operational model to IT as a Service (ITaaS). That is, let IT behave more like a business; offering services to those at the company. By adopting IT as a service, IT can streamline and simplify its operations and collapse a messy set of technologies into a series of services that employees at the company can use. In essence, IT would offer services that are competitive with public cloud (and more realistically, that incorporate public cloud resources as a component of other services).While ITaaS isn’t an entirely new concept, to date it hasn’t attained the vision of what it should be. ITaaS is an implementation of a “customer-oriented data center.” The old model didn’t focus on the customer, but instead on mechanically solving a problem more-or-less related to what the customer wanted. The old model typically offered “raw” IT assets instead of curated solutions. Want a desktops? Let’s send people around to deal with end user computing problems. Are you a developer and you built an app? Here’s a pile of servers and some change requests to get DNS records and load balancer entries created.A customer-oriented IT model acknowledges that IT works best as an organization focused on satisfying the technology needs of its constituents. Its first-class charter is solving problems for people, not trying to create solutions for technology problems.Like any business, the first thing IT should do is figure out the problems that end users are trying to solve. That requires customer empathy and a fundamental understanding of the types of customers IT services. IT departments aiming to achieve customer-centricity must map out who their customers are, which will then help define the specific services they’ll offer.By having a clear map of what customer problems you’re solving, you’ll see exploding growth in service use. How, you ask? People willingly consume more of what they need.But first, two things need to be true:1. Services need to be low friction. If they aren’t, customers will find an alternative, such as developers who go around IT to the public cloud. They also must offer self-service and policy driven control, rather than control via bureaucratic process.2. Services need to be presented in a way familiar to the customer, and not what’s most familiar to IT. For example, don’t give developers infrastructure templates and virtualization. That’s what “feels right” to IT. Developers want complexity removed and resources abstracted. Their number 1 goal is productivity and they want to interface with the data center via APIs and describe their needs via simple capability requests.Once these two tenets are part of your IT stack, and you’ve created a set of “SKUs” for your customers, you’ll find that propensity to consume skyrockets.Nearly every company on earth is becoming a software company. Whether your company builds farm equipment, mines rare metals or manufactures clothing, you likely have more developers and write more strategic custom software than ever before. Making sure that your developers are equipped to build and deliver applications at break-neck speed is directly supporting the future of company, and making one of your most valuable human assets – your developers – happy and productive.Developers need to be able to build fast, iterate faster and push innovative software out the door at the highest-possible quality. In IT, you need to make sure that you have the proper controls and policies in place to protect the organization, while the developers get the freedom to move fast.With private PaaS, the purpose is to give IT departments the software necessary to establish a hybrid PaaS service for developers. Customers leverage the technology to organize raw data center assets into a new service they can offer their developers who drive the rapid business innovation needed today. The alignment between IT and developers offered by an internal PaaS make it arguably the single most important technology you can offer in your ITaaS, customer-centric strategy.Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of Apprenda.See More

The world is rapidly being reshaped by software. It’s changing everything: how we work, how we monitor our health, how we spend time with our families, and more. Over time, quality of life around the world will continue to increase as a result of today’s unsung heroes: software developers. With more developers writing apps, we’ll see even more innovation and a world we can’t even dream of today.Last week, Microsoft announced that it is open sourcing its full, server-side .NET stack and that .NET will soon run on Linux and Mac platforms. In developer and enterprise circles, this is huge news and it means good things for everyone who is in some way involved with .NET.But what does this move mean? It means .NET developers can build more apps to run in more places. It means more competition between runtimes, languages, and stacks, leading to improvements in how developers work. It means, ultimately, that developers can unlock and produce even more quality of life for the world by merging one of the world’s best app-execution environments—.NET—with one of the world’s best server operating systems—Linux.I’m a fan of .NET, both the runtime and the semantics of its more popular languages, and I’ve used a number of Linux variants academically, personally, and professionally. To see these two worlds merge is fantastic. For one, there are many smart .NET developers who can now get access to a larger, broader community. Secondly, there are a lot of smart non-.NET developers who will now get the chance to harness .NET’s surprising power.Last week's big move was necessary and Satya Nadella and his team made the right decision to unlock the potential that Microsoft had been sitting on. That said, none of us should be surprised if .NET on Windows might have some better bells and whistles to take advantage of deep OS capabilities.You might also wonder what the open sourcing of .NET means for the future of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Apprenda. First, it means building .NET support into any PaaS should become easier over time. There may be different levels of support fidelity—especially if Windows .NET has more features—so supporting .NET on Linux may not be the same. But that said, .NET’s DNA should become much more pervasive now.Given that full .NET support will mean supporting Windows, Linux, and Mac, I expect PaaS architecture complexity to increase if a PaaS claims full-fidelity to .NET support. Application services available on Linux may also become easier to consume from .NET apps running on Linux.Ultimately, this new direction for .NET ensures that customers win. All vendors will compete in providing more in-depth support, which is something Apprenda has been touting for many years. Any decision that leads to more apps being built by more developers is one we fully support and, now that .NET is available everywhere, we will all benefit.Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of Apprenda.See More

Focus on the enterprise and its needs is becoming an obvious differentiator in the market. I am the CEO at Apprenda, and our independence allows us to integrate with the customers’ enterprise stack (not some add-on product) while our deep focus on .NET and Java give more capabilities to organizations’ frameworks.Rene Hermes, General Manager at Apprenda, has been busy establishing Apprenda in Europe. One company he’s engaged with is a European enterprise with over €20 Billion (EU) in revenue. It has spent over ten years building a Java PaaS equipped with many bells and whistles born from practical need. Even though they have had an internal PaaS for a decade, it has exploded in popularity recently. Where people used to be afraid to use a shared platform, they now flock to it for the agility and cost benefits. However, it is expensive and complicated to develop and maintain. Recently, Rene and Rakesh Malhotra, VP of Product at Apprenda, met with the person at the enterprise who architected and runs the custom enterprise PaaS. Here’s what he had to say:He had spoken to multiple private enterprise PaaS vendors and none were ready for the enterprise. He said that his enterprise would have had to “take a step back” in functionality to adopt a vendor PaaS to replace their current custom solution.His experiences with other private enterprise PaaS vendors led him to believe that the market was still a couple of years away from producing a viable third-party private PaaS.Going into the meeting with Apprenda, he said their enterprise “didn’t anticipate the need for a follow up with us” because of his experiences with PaaS vendors in the past. After he met with Rakesh and Rene, he said he was wrong about this and “definitely wanted a follow-up.”He said that both our feature set and our roadmap showed not only that Apprenda is more advanced than other vendors, but that Apprenda thinks about features in the correct context. He said the other enterprise PaaS vendors just “don’t get the enterprise.”Hearing these stories is great because it shows that we truly have a great product-market fit. From SaaS enablement of apps to private enterprise PaaS, Apprenda fits exactly what our customers need to help bridge their existing approach to IT and software development to a modern view of the data center.Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of Apprenda.See More

Every day, more non-software businesses are making software the backbone of their business, adding to their revenue streams in a diversified, high-margin way and becoming software-defined enterprises.A software-defined enterprise is defined in two ways – either a company that focuses on using software in the “back office” to run more efficiently OR generates new revenue with externally facing “front office” applications. The ultimate goal is to do both, but companies that achieve one of these goals will benefit tremendously, as Under Armour, Monsanto, Nike and Tesla have done.While all industries are capable of realizing the benefits of software, we’re currently seeing the most activity in the financial services, healthcare, media and manufacturing and defense industries. But all industries are ripe for this shift, as evidenced by the following examples.Last year, Under Armour, a sports and athletic equipment company, acquired MapMyFitness for $150 million, in large part to compete with Nike and Adidas, which have developed solutions to track customer athletic performance online through software. While you wouldn’t think of the apparel business as being a prime candidate for software, this acquisition illustrates the capability of another company uncovering new sources of revenue through software.Agribusiness giant Monsanto recently acquired The Climate Corporation, a climate analytics company, to help them increase crop yields and profit. With this new technology, farmers will be able to rely on big data to track and analyze weather and crop-specific conditions and provide future forecasts – all from a mobile device. This is another example of software revolutionizing an industry leader in a space not typically known its technological savviness. It’s clear that there’s tremendous value in reevaluating existing revenue streams and shifting focus to software, but how can companies begin to make this shift if an acquisition is out of the question? Let’s look at what companies without full coffers can do to facilitate this transition:Organize IT with the end goal in mind: Businesses must make a cultural shift when it comes to how IT assets are organized and stop thinking of the different components of IT as individual moving parts. It’s critical for companies to reorganize IT to be part of a common cloud and ensure that all aspects of the organization, from networking systems, servers, Linux/Windows operating systems and apps become part of an internal ecosystem to streamline software development. Many forward-thinking companies have re-architected their IT departments and datacenters to take advantage of the flexibility and agility of the cloud.Companies that make this shift will see the bigger picture of how their IT department can enable them to succeed and develop applications more efficiently and go to market more quickly.Befriend the IT department: IT has a reputation for being conservative and reactive, wanting to avoid risks and stay with the safe, proven model it’s used to. This reputation is partially earned, but is also exacerbated by the attitude that IT is a barrier to innovation. Many companies view the IT department as an obstacle instead of seeing how it helps to enable business.The IT department can become a great business partner internally and be even more cost effective than public cloud, especially for large organizations that require more resilience, governance and control. It is also easier to consume cloud services via internal private clouds since there are no regulatory concerns, and everything is aligned across various lines of business. Beyond reorganizing IT assets, businesses should reframe how they view the IT department and start thinking about the IT department as a strategic partner instead of a service desk.Evaluate technologies to set the company up for success: Many technologies help pave the way as companies make the shift to software-defined enterprises. In the growing API economy, companies need a central location to manage API creation and maintenance, data integration and performance. Technologies like PaaS serve as the foundation to run a shared ecosystem of APIs. With an increasingly mobile workforce, solutions that support mobile from the backend and are accelerating development on the mobile devices themselves are critical. Lastly, enterprises are realizing that big data and analytics, in particular internal data-sets, play a critical role in customer experience, helping them to identify how they can provide cloud services to customers. Companies that will ultimately succeed will have all of these components. By creating cloud services that customers use, the IT department will become more efficient and nimble. This creates higher margins and results in companies generating new streams of revenue in a very rich way. In order to pursue these new revenue streams, IT has no option but to modernize its approach to running infrastructure to be more cloud-like. If it doesn’t, running applications will cost too much and drive margins down.Enterprises must think beyond today’s products and services and focus on new, forward-thinking revenue generators to realize the benefits of a software-defined approach. Companies must make the innovation jump or risk being taken out by competitors that are already doing so, leaving them with two choices: Either disrupt yourself or be disrupted by someone else. Trust me when I say, maintain control by disrupting yourself.Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of Apprenda.See More

Every day, more non-software businesses are making software the backbone of their business, adding to their revenue streams in a diversified, high-margin way and becoming software-defined enterprises.A software-defined enterprise is defined in two ways – either a company that focuses on using software in the “back office” to run more efficiently OR generates new revenue with externally facing “front office” applications. The ultimate goal is to do both, but companies that achieve one of these goals will benefit tremendously, as Under Armour, Monsanto, Nike and Tesla have done.While all industries are capable of realizing the benefits of software, we’re currently seeing the most activity in the financial services, healthcare, media and manufacturing and defense industries. But all industries are ripe for this shift, as evidenced by the following examples.Last year, Under Armour, a sports and athletic equipment company, acquired MapMyFitness for $150 million, in large part to compete with Nike and Adidas, which have developed solutions to track customer athletic performance online through software. While you wouldn’t think of the apparel business as being a prime candidate for software, this acquisition illustrates the capability of another company uncovering new sources of revenue through software.Agribusiness giant Monsanto recently acquired The Climate Corporation, a climate analytics company, to help them increase crop yields and profit. With this new technology, farmers will be able to rely on big data to track and analyze weather and crop-specific conditions and provide future forecasts – all from a mobile device. This is another example of software revolutionizing an industry leader in a space not typically known its technological savviness. It’s clear that there’s tremendous value in reevaluating existing revenue streams and shifting focus to software, but how can companies begin to make this shift if an acquisition is out of the question? Let’s look at what companies without full coffers can do to facilitate this transition:Organize IT with the end goal in mind: Businesses must make a cultural shift when it comes to how IT assets are organized and stop thinking of the different components of IT as individual moving parts. It’s critical for companies to reorganize IT to be part of a common cloud and ensure that all aspects of the organization, from networking systems, servers, Linux/Windows operating systems and apps become part of an internal ecosystem to streamline software development. Many forward-thinking companies have re-architected their IT departments and datacenters to take advantage of the flexibility and agility of the cloud.Companies that make this shift will see the bigger picture of how their IT department can enable them to succeed and develop applications more efficiently and go to market more quickly.Befriend the IT department: IT has a reputation for being conservative and reactive, wanting to avoid risks and stay with the safe, proven model it’s used to. This reputation is partially earned, but is also exacerbated by the attitude that IT is a barrier to innovation. Many companies view the IT department as an obstacle instead of seeing how it helps to enable business.The IT department can become a great business partner internally and be even more cost effective than public cloud, especially for large organizations that require more resilience, governance and control. It is also easier to consume cloud services via internal private clouds since there are no regulatory concerns, and everything is aligned across various lines of business. Beyond reorganizing IT assets, businesses should reframe how they view the IT department and start thinking about the IT department as a strategic partner instead of a service desk.Evaluate technologies to set the company up for success: Many technologies help pave the way as companies make the shift to software-defined enterprises. In the growing API economy, companies need a central location to manage API creation and maintenance, data integration and performance. Technologies like PaaS serve as the foundation to run a shared ecosystem of APIs. With an increasingly mobile workforce, solutions that support mobile from the backend and are accelerating development on the mobile devices themselves are critical. Lastly, enterprises are realizing that big data and analytics, in particular internal data-sets, play a critical role in customer experience, helping them to identify how they can provide cloud services to customers. Companies that will ultimately succeed will have all of these components. By creating cloud services that customers use, the IT department will become more efficient and nimble. This creates higher margins and results in companies generating new streams of revenue in a very rich way. In order to pursue these new revenue streams, IT has no option but to modernize its approach to running infrastructure to be more cloud-like. If it doesn’t, running applications will cost too much and drive margins down.Enterprises must think beyond today’s products and services and focus on new, forward-thinking revenue generators to realize the benefits of a software-defined approach. Companies must make the innovation jump or risk being taken out by competitors that are already doing so, leaving them with two choices: Either disrupt yourself or be disrupted by someone else. Trust me when I say, maintain control by disrupting yourself.Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of Apprenda.See More

Let’s cut through the chatter about mobile enterprise strategies and talk about what these enterprises are really up against. An enterprise mobile strategy requires setting up an on-premises common back end system for getting the hundreds of applications and thousands of workflows that they want to expose to thousands - or even millions - of customers, partners and internal employees via mobile devices.Most mobile applications connect to one or more server-side web service APIs that expose the business logic and data the mobile app needs.When we talk to our early adopting Platform-as-a-Service customers, we hear that they don’t care about what type of mobile device is accessing their server side services and that the client side has little impact on strategy. The real need is a common platform – a shred services ecosystem - for handling all that challenges associated with a mobile strategy. Enterprise mobile development strategies create a very specific set of challenges that dictate a specific set of characteristics that are expected of enterprise mobile back- end systems. ￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼ 1. Multi-tenant – The very nature of mobile means that many independent end-users will be using mobile applications that consume back-end APIs. This is complicated even further in enterprises since most do segmented “hub and spoke” organizations, with groups of employees consuming applications as a team, need to share data. An end-user should only see their data and requests, and no one else’s. As an example, take retail, healthcare, banking and insurance companies. The tenants end up being stores, hospitals and branch offices which need their data segregated (for reporting or regulatory reasons) and then users within each location also need data separated. As a result, the web services and their data sources that back a mobile application’s API need to be multi-tenant, allowing the back-end to segregate requests and data for each mobile customer. New web services need to be built in a multi-tenant fashion, and old services need to be retrofitted for multi-tenancy.2. Secure – Mobile means that end-user activity is occurring outside the firewall and the brick wall, alike. All mobile applications need to connect to back-end services in a credentialed, secured way that is portable across devices and mobile OS’ and that is consistent, in terms of model and architecture, to ensure safety of the enterprise’s data and IT assets.3. Scalable – Given the load demands that mobile will place on APIs, back-end web services need to scale out seamlessly to support increases in load. In addition to increased load, mobile clients tend to exercise APIs in new and often hard-to-predict usage patterns. Scalable services need to be accessible through single API entry points; essentially, providing mobile devices with a load balanced, scalable, global URL for all REST and/or SOAP API calls.4. Highly Available and Reliable – Mobile end users have the same, if not greater, reliability and availability expectations of their applications and services than traditional web applications. Back-end services need to handle failure gracefully and recover quickly, and at scale. Any inability to detect critical situations and recover quickly will likely impact SLA commitments to end- users. In addition, the consequences of failure become all the more severe when previous protocols, or non-mobile enabled workflows, become long forgotten.5. Resident of a Shared Services Environment – Building composite applications is a non-trivial task. Sticky issues such as API publishing, dependency management and dynamic binding of services mean that a mobile back-end that aggregates workflows needs significant investment in orthogonal, yet mission critical, functionality. A shared services environment enables these challenges to be solved in a consistent and secure manner.6. Meterable – The ability to track API level requests, meter those requests and throttle when appropriate help to manage the amount of interaction any given device can have with the back-end. This is a critical capability that is part of general API management, but higher in importance due to the potential negative impact on infrastructure resource management if handled improperly.7. Manageable – Mobile back-ends, like any other software package, need to be managed. Upgrades and patches to back- end web services, for example, need to occur seamlessly with no disruption to the mobile API endpoint. Mobile clients tend to be updated more frequently to make new capabilities available to clients in a more iterative way. Properly orchestrating the back-end update, versioning and compatibility is critical. Diagnostic information related to back-end failures, resource utilization and consumption information and current lifecycle status all need to be readily available.Despite being a non-exhaustive list, these characteristics represent a significant amount of work. An enterprise must invest in addressing these characteristics in each mobile back-end endeavor, or in a platform, to address these issues in a common way across the enterprise’s mobile development efforts.Most enterprises, both for economic and standardization reasons, would opt for a common platform that only an enterprise quality PaaS can deliver.Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of Apprenda.See More

Over the past year, private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) gained significant adoption by large corporations, building momentum that will exponentially increase in 2014. Organizations across a variety of industries turned cloud into reality through PaaS after realizing the benefits including faster application development, reduced costs, and the ability to turn software into a revenue-generating business.One example of a large company that adopted PaaS in 2013 is JPMorgan Chase. Given the scale and growth of JPMorgan Chase’s application portfolio, the bank concluded that it could reap significant time and money savings by modernizing its IT investments to operate as a private PaaS. The platform is now used by over 430 development teams across the bank, having more than 2,000 .NET and Java applications running live, with close to 600 of those applications deployed to Apprenda within the first 12 months of production.In addition to realizing its many benefits, companies recognized how new PaaS technology that adapts to how they currently operate, particularly when it comes to development languages, is a necessary requirement. Enterprises realized that PaaS needs to support more traditional enterprise coding languages such as .NET and Java, rather than limited to startup-centric languages Ruby on Rails or Python, in order to be successful.Emerging trends in mobile, hybrid cloud architecture, and software-defined products will continue to drive mainstream PaaS adoption as enterprises seek cloud solutions that meet or exceed needs for cost savings, business agility and data security. This presents an exciting time for companies to take advantage of the cloud by transitioning to a private or hybrid cloud model.Looking Ahead to 2014According to GigaOM Research, the PaaS market is predicted to reach more than 20 billion dollars in 2014. With expected exponential growth on the horizon, many opportunities exist surrounding emerging trends in hybrid-cloud architecture, mobile, and software-defined anything that will drive PaaS adoption in the enterprise.Hybrid cloud: This will be top of mind for CIOs in 2014 as enterprises evolve from cloud hype to reality. While public cloud has received the lion’s share of hype in recent years, real enterprise cloud adoption starts with private cloud and transitions to public through a hybrid approach. As the primary demand of every enterprise, hybrid makes using the cloud possible and serves as a good transition for companies with all types of security needs.Mobile: In 2013, enterprises were not building new workflows for mobile but were instead offering web-based apps. With its ease of use, PaaS will strengthen mobile development in 2014. PaaS enables companies to take existing workflows and expose them in a way that is secure and easy, resulting in more agile and streamlined mobile app development.Software-defined anything: To compete and be more relevant, companies must evaluate how they can add revenue streams through software. Companies such as Diebold, Nike, and Tesla have already begun experimenting with ways to improve operational efficiency and transform their services with software and have been met with great success. Aware that tremendous potential exists to increase net margins, improve customer acquisition, and enhance customer loyalty, companies will continue exploring new ways of generating software-based revenue.The Future Lies in Software-Defined EnterprisesAn exciting opportunity exists for organizations to revolutionize their business model by establishing software as a core strategy, enabled by private or hybrid cloud solutions. To maintain a competitive advantage, CIOs should continue tracking trends in hybrid cloud, mobile development, cloud governance and compliance, big data, and cloud-based business intelligence.By keeping up with trends and identifying the value in becoming a software-defined enterprise, CIOs can transform their businesses while reducing costs, increasing business agility and safeguarding data security.Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) company Apprenda.See More

Public cloud is tremendously popular – there’s no question. However, enterprises have yet to consume public IaaS and PaaS in an “at-scale” way. They dabble in public IaaS and PaaS here and there, but public cloud is home to only a *tiny* minority of enterprise application workloads. Why? Enterprise workloads are trapped within the firewall by a few key constraints (some perceived, some political, some real - in order of constraint complexity):Dependencies – Custom apps written by enterprises often have dependencies on other external systems that either: A) can’t themselves be brought to public cloud, thereby making them inaccessible; or B) cannot be safely exposed to the outside world such that those dependencies can be resolvedPerformance – Stringent performance requirements may prevent certain applications from landing on a public cloud, particularly when high I/O performance is required.Security – Public clouds may not be able to fulfill security requirements, particularly in regulated industries such as banking.Data – Because of size and sensitivity, many data loads may not be easy to move to a public cloud. This data acts as an anchor; a corollary is that most applications depending on this data will also not move to public cloud.Long term, however, most of these barriers will break down (starting with dependencies first), and it’s pretty clear that as a result, enterprises will consume a meaningful amount of public AND private cloud. Ultimately, the end state for enterprise IT will be hybrid, and yes, enterprises WILL consume a meaningful amount of public cloud. However, the secret to getting there is implementing private PaaS first. Why, you ask? Because of the above constraints.If we take the application portfolio of a typical enterprise, we find that each application is bound by zero or more of the above constraints. In fact, we can think of these constraints as a set of concentric rings, with the innermost ring, data, being the most complex constraint to deal with, and the outermost ring, dependency, being the least.When an application runs in-house, these constraints are satisfied. In today’s 2013 public cloud context, it’s hard enough to satisfy any one of these constraints, let alone all four of them. This means that an enterprise must choose from one of two strategies when it comes to PaaS:Wait for the constraints to either be lifted or to solve them via technology (e.g., Azure VPN services or Amazon VPC, which drastically reduces the impact of the Dependency constraint).Run a private PaaS behind the firewall, ensuring guest applications on the PaaS automatically satisfy these constraints. A private PaaS could logically sit within the innermost ring, satisfying application workloads that not only have the most stringent constraint, but that might be constrained by all four major roadblocks.The private PaaS first strategy places emphasis on getting apps on a PaaS rather than on a public PaaS only. This produces benefits that include:Preparing applications to run on an infrastructure abstracted PaaS environmentAligning the IT and developer culture with PaaS consumption, in generalCreating ROI through utilization efficiency, devops, agility and lowered operations frictionThe first two benefits ease the adoption of public cloud, since it becomes less of a technical and cultural shock. A good private PaaS allows pooling of public IaaS resources into the logical private instance, with policy control to influence application placement. Over time, as constraints breakdown, and applications are free to migrate to public cloud, the applications can do so on the private PaaS. The private PaaS, via policy, can place apps on public resources instead of public cloud – and voila, we have an enterprise consuming public IaaS!This is the first step toward a hybrid approach as enterprises will start to use private PaaS to consume public IaaS for key workloads at a pace that fits their strategy. What will happen to the concentric rings, should a hybrid approach become the norm?Overtime, our first concentric ring model will start to make less sense. A new model will emerge and look similar to the one above, due to the introduction of new technology and the resulting dissolution of the boundaries one by one. Ultimately, this new tech will force enterprises to re-evaluate their strategies. Enterprises will begin consuming public IaaS for key workloads at a pace that fits their strategy. For web/SOA style apps, that consumption will likely happen through a hybrid PaaS deployment. After all, in the long term most of these barriers will break down. As stated earlier, the end state for enterprise IT will be enterprise hybrid PaaS, a subject I’ve already written about in the past. What do you think?Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of the Open Platform as a Service (PaaS) company Apprenda.See More